Seth’s post “How much can I get away with?” made me think of that human tendency to do as little as we must to “get by”.
While I doubt its conscious, I think many of us have calculated the minimum we have to do to “get by” with our wife. Some guys do nothing more than that. Some do 10% or 25% more and think they’re going above and beyond. Many of us fall back to that minimum, or some small bit above that minimum, when life gets difficult/busy/stressful. (The last of those is my big one.)
Setting aside the reality that we should love her enough to go WAY beyond the minimum, there are logical fallacies in this behaviour.
- What we do, and don’t do, is measured in both the short-term and the long-term. The minimum we can get by with any given day is not the amount we can get by with day in and day out. If you keep doing just the minimum, you’re okay each day, but you’re building up a backlog of “not enough” for the week, month, year, and so on.
- Even if you stay ahead of the build-up of not enough, what if you hit a prolonged difficult/busy/stressful time in your life? You’ve been “just getting by” so you have no reserves and now you can’t do the bare minimum for any length of time.
- What if you face a crisis: the death of a family member, long-term illness or disease (you, your wife, or one of the kids), or prolonged unemployment? In these situations, couples who have been getting by on “just enough” have very high divorce rates. Those who have been doing more than the minimum have a much better chance of their marriage surviving and maybe even coming out better than when they started the crisis.
[This post first appeared March 28, 2011.]
A post worth reading:
Heaven Made Marriage | You Become What You Behold ◄ What do you choose to behold in your marriage?
Image by Charles Risen from Pixabay
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